


diig iit.ppt

by Vintar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 08:12:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vintar/pseuds/Vintar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"An important part of actively applied osteology is workplace safety!" Aradia said, lifting the skull into the air for everyone to see, its jaws gnashing furiously at the air. "Proper training for safely handling animate exanimates is critical to working with the undead, re-dead, quasi-dead, and sometimes even just particularly unhappy coworkers!"</p>
<p>Or: Aradia Megido attempts to give a presentation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	diig iit.ppt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [negativecosine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/gifts).



A list of things currently in possession of Aradia Megido, age twelve and a half sweeps: 

• a smart casual outfit, carefully chosen to make her seem professional without making her look overdressed;

• an official badge from the scientific research wing of the sector's fleet, bearing her name and department on an unmissable red background, and pinned high enough on her lapel to be easily accidentally-on-purpose hidden by her hair when attempting to schmooze with hemosnobs;

• one Sollux Captor, recalcitrant tech support and recalcitrant field assistant and recalcitrant moiral, who had turned down a career as a helmsman because he wasn't allow to jailbreak the OS; 

• a powerpoint presentation and a handful of notecards; and

• five crates of dead bodies.

 

A list of things currently not in possession of Aradia Megido, age twelve and a half sweeps: 

• assurance of another grant;

• patience.

 

"It'll be fine," Sollux said.

Aradia paced the tiny stage. "It doesn't feel like it!" She fought the urge to adjust the skeletons where they lay in their cases. Should they be more jaunty? Placing their arms down by their sides seemed a bit dull. She could probably whip up some more exciting poses without disturbing their most interesting features.

"It'll be fine," he repeated, not looking up from his huskphone, "because all of your slides are in legible fucking fonts, without any clipart or transistion effects."

"And that's the important part?"

"To me it is." He finished off his bag of vending machine flattened tuber snacks. Under her glare, he sarcastically brushed crumbs off of her lectern. "I've sat through so many dire presentations, AA. Trollkind is only meant to see so many bad fonts before--" He mimed his head exploding. "Papyrus pan."

People started to trickle into the room, the poster on the door advertising a presentation about _THE PEOPLE OF SDF-1 AND THEIR HIDEOUS PAINFUL DEATHS (NO NECROMANCERS, WARLOCKS, OR EXORCISTS ADMITTED)_. Aradia flicked through her notes, then lay them down flat and took a deep breath. "We found some neat stuff!" She said to herself. "We know it's neat, and if they have anything rattling around their thinkpan they should realise it too. And if they don't fund another dig, I'm going to punch them right in the face!"

"That's the spirit." Sollux went back to his phone. "They wanted bones. You found some bones. You've got it in the bag, AA."

Aradia had taken a gaggle of first and second-year students to the little biome-4 planet designated as SDF-1. Though getting her first dig funding had been a delight, none of the students had been happy to have been torn away from the academy and strongarmed into volunteering alongside her. Neither had Sollux, but for a different reason: the planet had no internet signal. He'd laid in his travel cocoon and refused to talk to her for a week straight.

The planet was in the Third Push belt, a series of small planets that were far enough from anything else to not be worth the effort of exploring, but weren't close enough to the frontier to be interesting. So, the little planet had remained unexplored for years.

At least, that had been the theory, until Aradia had found mention of it in a series of historical journals collected from a smuggler. They'd mentioned a small society formed by runaways and mutineers on the planet, and when she'd made an exploratory assay she'd found an exciting array of historical artifacts. Clay-brick recupracoons! Ritually-sacrificed culls! Shoulder-mounted plasma cannons, just like in the old days! She'd petitioned for funds and got them, and her expedition had come back with a variety of interesting corpses.

There was so much to talk about, but she'd pared it down to the most impressive parts. She had an interesting talk planned, a powerpoint presentation thoroughly scrubbed of any visually offensive assets, and, as standard for any halfway decent troll discipline, a bunch of skeletons that had been killed in a variety of interesting ways for the audience to prod at and poke afterwards. Her audience more or less settled in, she gestured for quiet and took a breath.

Off to the side, Sollux went "Argh". Aradia ignored him and tried to start again. Sollux groused in the exact same way about everything from being flamed on apianet forums to running out of disgusting energy drinks to being attacked by ghasts (though that had only happened once, and she was getting sick of hearing about it!).

A moment later, he did it again. When she flicked a quick glance over to where he was sitting, he was pressing a hand to his forehead, sparks arcing from his major to minor horns. Aradia was just about to fling a notecard at him like a tiny boring ninja star in punishment for ruining her conference by griping about a headache, but found herself thwarted when the room disappeared.

_\--her quadrant group moved ahead of her, sloshing through the swamp. She tightened her grip on her axe. The sun was so much brighter than it had seemed on the viewscreen--_

_\--the captain was slumped over in his chair, horns bowed and blood starting to pool around his boots. The first mate tossed her his gun, winking--_

_\--a monster pinwheeled above her, sun shining through its membranous wings and dappling her with shadow as she raised her ship-hull harpoon--_

Aradia banged her fists on the podium, head pounding from the ghostly afterimages. "All right," she shouted, "who in here is a necromancer? Didn't you read the sign?!"

Everyone in the crowd twisted in their seats to look at each other. After an awkward, guilty moment, a nervous blueblood in the back row raised his hand.

"Out!" snapped Aradia, but it was too late. Behind her, the rattling started.

The biological sciences department was quite small, and the anthropology department was even more so. The audience that had shown up to a no-name redblood's presentation were mostly staff long past their fieldwork days, who appreciated the chance to gossip with others and to double-check that no-one else was doing anything more impressive than they were, and students, most of whom had just shown up for the snacks.

It was perhaps understandable that none of them, then, had come prepared to fight off a wave of the undead. A tealblood cryptopalaeontologist went down as a skeleton tore out her throat, and the crowd scrambled.

Aradia stared at the chaos as her future went up in clanky, boney smoke. She looked over to Sollux for support, but instead found him trying to take photos of the carnage on his phone.

"Unless you want me to blast them into skeleton confetti, I can't do shit," he said, before she could do more than glare. "Can you pull the ghosts out of them?"

"It's too late, they're too corporeal." The two of them watched for a moment as the skeleton with the axe wounds and the skeleton with the spear running through its head both descended upon a hapless ghosteology undergrad. 

"Sucks two be you," Sollux said. "Don't worry, you can always start a new life farming gold. I'll show you the ropes."

Aradia straightened up, then jumped off of the stage.

"As you can see here," she said, striding through the chaos and raising her voice above the din, "we found evidence of an unregistered colony on SDF-1." She got between a terrified bunch of students and a rampaging skeleton, and caught it neatly by the zip-tie attaching its jawbone to its skull. It awkwardly tried to pull away from her grasp, like a grub getting its cheek pinched by its lusus. 

"From taking measurements of several key hemosteological traits, we identified that the colony was comprised of low to mid-high bloods. Observe the length of the clavicle here and the shape of the scapula." Her attempts to point the salient features out on her current specimen was made somewhat imprecise by it trying to slap her hand away. "Compare them to those on the specimen that's-- damn, where did it go? Oh, that one, the one over there attempting to eat the young man from gremlinguistics." 

"While this shut down speculation that the colony might have been the result of a runaway tyrian adverse to royal combat, it's nonetheless no less interesting!" She manoeuvred the hapless skeleton around in a circle and back to the crate it had been stored in. It lost a few finger bones when she booted it in and slammed the lid shut, but it was an acceptable price to pay. She scooped them up and popped them into an empty cup for safe-keeping, leaving them scrabbling angrily in an inch of cheap coffee.

The light changed. Aradia looked around to see that Sollux had taken up position behind her lectern, and was moving through the slides.

Ahead of her, a spirited hydranthropologist tried to punch a skeleton in the face and quickly discovered why that particular move really hinged upon one's opponent actually having a face to punch in the first place. As he cringed away clutching at his bleeding hand, Aradia vaulted over a row of rickety chairs and kicked the skeleton in the knee.

"Please don't damage the teeth!" she shouted as it collapsed like a bad game of Jengargh. "They're important for studying diet and aging processes, as can be seen on the current slide!" She knelt down behind the skeleton, placed the palm of her hand on the top of its head, then speared her fingers into its empty eye sockets. With one quick motion, she popped its skull off. The rest of the skeleton flopped around uselessly by her feet, making a rude gesture.

"An important part of actively applied osteology is workplace safety!" Aradia said, lifting the skull into the air for everyone to see, its jaws gnashing furiously at the air. "Proper training for safely handling animate exanimates is critical to working with the undead, re-dead, quasi-dead, and sometimes even just particularly unhappy coworkers!"

In the corner of her slides, Sollux had opened a window to check troll Slashdot. Aradia lobbed the skull at him. He caught it with his psionics, flipped her off, and set it down on the edge of the lectern, where it began to chew angrily on her husktop.

On the other side of the room the necromancer who had started the whole mess was hiding behind a makeshift table fort, being slowly closed in on by the remaining skeletons. Aradia shoulder-checked one out of the way, wincing as it bounced into another skeleton with a clatter.

As all the skeletons in the room descended upon their unwilling master, Aradia flipped the table fort, sending cheap snacks and paper plates flying. With the certain fleet-footedness that good boots and a touch of levitation gave you, she grabbed the necromancer by an arm and dragged him to safety on the stage. 

"Thank you," he cried.

Aradia beamed. "No problem," she said, and put him in a headlock.

"Now," she said to what remained of her audience, "there are still many questions about the SDF-1 site that remain unanswered!" She held on tighter as the necromancer scrabbled at her arms. "Including new questions about their weaponry and combat styles! You there, you're a warologist, aren't you? I think I saw twinkle in your eyes when that one came at you with that axe, didn't I?" She squeezed harder. "If we secure the funding needed for another dig, we're confident we can shed a lot of light on what happened on SDF-1, and the evolution of renegade colonies in general!"

With a wheeze, the necromancer slipped into unconsciousness. The skeletons paused for a moment, as if uncertain about what to do, and then gently collapsed into piles.

Slowly, everyone began to clap.

"See?" Sollux said, not looking up from the computer. "In the bag."


End file.
